§ 1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertisements (“ads”), such as ads served in an online environment. In particular, the present invention concerns improving decisions related to serving ads.
§ 1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to a receptive audience. That is, targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.) Query keyword relevant advertising, such as the AdWords advertising system by Google of Mountain View, Calif., has been used by search engines. Similarly, content-relevant advertising systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/314,427 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '427 application”) titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and Ser. No. 10/375,900 (incorporated by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”) titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Hank, Deepak Tindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors, describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example. The AdSense advertising system by Google of Mountain View, Calif. is an example of a content targeted ad delivery system used to serve ads on Web pages.
Current systems for serving targeted text ads may auction or arbitrate a given number of “spots” on a document (e.g., a Web page instance) to competing ads. Such spots typically specify a particular type of ad that may be served. For example, FIG. 1 illustrates a search result Web page portion 100 having two (2) wide-format, text ad spots at the top of the Web page filled by two (2) ads 110, 112, and eight (8) normal-format text ad spots in the right column of the page filled by eight (8) ads 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134. There may be more than two (2) ads competing to be served in the two (2) wide-format text ad spots and more than eight (8) ads competing to be served in the eight (8) normal-format text ad spots. Ad serving facilities may arbitrate each ad spot to competing ads using an auction model. For example, competing ads can be placed in available ad spots using a bid price (associated with each ad) only. As another example, competing ads can be placed in available ad spots using some combination of an offer price, ad performance (e.g., in terms of selection rate, user ratings, conversion rate, etc.), and/or ad relevancy.
Regardless of the arbitration technique used, generally, all available ad spots are filled (to the extent that there are enough ads available to fill them). However, there may be some instances under which this policy of filling all available ad spots, if possible or to the greatest extent possible, might not be desirable from the standpoint of the end user, the Web page owner or publisher, and/or the ad serving facility. Accordingly, better techniques for determining how to best fill available ad spots would be useful.